Personal Assistant

Captures tasks and events from a WhatsApp group, and sends back a calendar and to-do digest.

Build the inbox where the user already is.

Two scheduled tasks against one WhatsApp group. The capture pass reads anything new I’ve written and turns it into a task or a calendar event. The digest pass sends back what’s on today and what’s still open.

The design decision that made it work: no app. Every previous attempt at a personal task system failed because it required me to open something. This one lives in the chat app I already have open, so capture costs nothing.

How it is built

The AI agent posts into the same group it reads from, which creates an obvious problem, it sees its own messages and tries to turn them into tasks. Messages are therefore fingerprinted, and the AI agent skips anything it recognises as its own.

What it got wrong

The self-filter hid real messages. The dedup worked by hashing recent messages. When several AI agents posted into overlapping windows, a genuine message from me could sit underneath a block of AI agent output and get skipped along with it. Capturing nothing looks identical to there being nothing to capture.

It could not tell a plan from a report. “Book the flights” is a task. “Flights booked” is a completed one. The AI agent read both as new work and quietly built a backlog of things that had already happened.

The lesson

An AI agent that writes into its own input stream needs a much stronger sense of self than you expect. Most of the complexity here is not the calendar or the parsing, it is the AI agent working out which messages are its own echo.